Europe's "Beauty" Has a History. Africa Should Remember It.

Traveling through the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium over the past few weeks, I found myself constantly looking up. The architecture is lovely. Entire neighborhoods have been preserved for centuries, with buildings that still stand as monuments to history, craftsmanship, and national pride. However,  the more I looked at these cities, the more I asked: how much of this prosperity was built with wealth extracted from places like Africa?

It is difficult to separate Europe's rise from centuries of colonialism, slavery, forced labor, and the extraction of resources from Africa. The merchant families, banks, trading companies, and governments that accumulated enormous fortunes through empire also financed industries, universities, museums, public institutions, and urban development.

Europe did not become wealthy in a vacuum. Its economic transformation was closely tied to an imperial system that drew immense wealth from colonies, including across Africa.

In Amsterdam, for example, the Dutch state now openly acknowledges that slavery helped make the Netherlands an economic world power. Dutch merchants, banks and trading companies profited from enslaved African labor in the Caribbean and Suriname, and those profits flowed into canal houses, warehouses, art collections and civic power. 

Amsterdam’s famous canal belt is one of the clearest examples. Many canal houses were owned by merchants involved in colonial trade, plantation finance, shipping, insurance and slavery-linked commerce.

King Leopold II of Belgium personally controlled the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, and the profits from forced labour, especially rubber and ivory, helped finance his grand urban projects. The Cinquantenaire Arch in Brussels was built under Leopold’s orders and has long been linked to Congo profits.

Germany’s colonial violence in Africa was also severe, especially in Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon and Togo. Between 1904 and 1908, German forces systematically carried out the first genocide of the 20th century. Berlin’s Humboldt Forum is not simply built from African wealth, but it houses collections whose histories are tied to colonial conquest, extraction and looting.

That history changes how I experience these cities. Yes, the cities are pretty, but it is also a reminder that the global inequality we see today did not happen by accident. Some societies accumulated capital over centuries while others were systematically stripped of people, resources, and economic independence. We cannot honestly compare Europe and Africa today without acknowledging that history.

What makes the experience even more ironic is that many Africans now spend months trying to obtain visas just to visit these countries. We produce bank statements, employment letters, invitation letters, hotel bookings, and proof that we intend to return home. Many applicants are refused without meaningful explanation. We are expected to prove that we deserve temporary access to countries whose governments and businesses once crossed into Africa without invitation, took what they wanted, imposed borders that still shape our politics, and extracted wealth on a scale that transformed their own economies.

There is another reality that becomes visible once you spend time here. Europe is often presented across Africa as the model to aspire to, a place where everything simply works. And while there is much to admire about the efficiency of public services, transport systems, and institutions, there are also contradictions that are rarely discussed. A disproportionate number of African immigrants work in hotels, warehouses, transport, cleaning services, care work, and other essential service industries that keep these economies functioning. There is dignity in every kind of honest work, but it is worth asking why so many highly educated Africans find themselves concentrated in sectors that European citizens are increasingly unwilling to fill.

Many Africans also discover that racism has not disappeared, these days,  it appears as subtle suspicion, the security guy who follwed me as I shopped in a fashion store in Koningsplein, the officer who asked me to step aside for extra search and questioning at the airport, the waitress who ignored me at the cafe while taking everyone’s order except mine and then could not meet my eyes as I walked out after not being attended to for over 30min, surprise that you speak confidently or occupy professional spaces, or the persistent feeling that you are accepted only on certain terms. These experiences may seem small in isolation, but together they reveal that Europe is hardly the post-racial ideal it is sometimes imagined to be from afar.

Too often, Africans see Europe only through the lens of opportunity, ignoring the historical conditions that created that opportunity in the first place. We celebrate visa approvals as personal victories. We measure success by how close we can get to Europe. I have even heard some Africans speak about Europe with a level of admiration that borders on reverence, while speaking about Africa with disappointment and resignation.

That mindset is one of the greatest obstacles to genuine Pan-African progress.

More than anything, experiences like this should force us to ask harder questions about the relationship between Africa and the West today. Colonialism may have formally ended, but systems of extraction did not simply disappear. They just evolved. As Africans, we have a responsibility to examine every trade agreement, every security partnership, every development programme and every foreign policy proposal through a Pan-African lens. We should be asking who truly benefits, who controls the resources, who shapes the rules, and whether these arrangements strengthen African sovereignty or simply preserve old patterns of dependence in new forms. We cannot afford to accept every Western initiative as inherently benevolent simply because it is packaged as aid, investment, or partnership. 

That also means finding our voices. For too long, many Africans have been more comfortable criticizing our own governments than questioning the policies of powerful foreign states that continue to exert enormous influence over our economies, security and political choices. We should be just as willing to challenge unfair trade arrangements, exploitative corporate practices, military interventions, and diplomatic pressure when they undermine African interests.

At the same time, we should recognize and support African governments that genuinely defend the continent's sovereignty, pursue independent foreign policies, and negotiate from a position of dignity rather than dependency. Pan-Africanism has to become a framework for how we evaluate every international relationship and every decision that shapes the future of this continent.

The future of this continent will not be built by waiting for Europe to rescue us, validate us, or offer us opportunities. It will be built by Africans who choose to invest their talent, capital, and imagination into solving African problems. We should be building stronger universities, financing African research, preserving our own heritage, supporting African industries, strengthening our institutions, and demanding competent leadership. We should be asking why African capital so often leaves the continent instead of building it, and why so many of our brightest minds still feel that success begins with a visa stamp.

Europe should not be the measure of our worth or the destination against which we define success. If anything, walking through these cities should remind us that every great civilization is built over generations through deliberate investment, confident institutions, and long-term thinking.

Africa deserves that same ambition. Our energy should be focused less on seeking acceptance elsewhere and more on building societies that future generations of Africans will be proud to inherit, and that the rest of the world will one day travel to admire.